New figures from the Northern Dutch police shed light on a growing problem
Until now, the province of Brabant in the south of the Netherlands was known as a place where most laboratories for drugs were to be found, but it appears that drug producers are using buildings in the province of Drenthe more and more. As reported by RTV Drenthe.
Since 2016, Drenthe has had seventeen production locations for synthetic drugs such as ecstasy and crystal meth found by police. In Friesland and Groningen the number of production locations for drugs was considerably lower. In the past four and a half years there were eight in Friesland and four in Groningen.
2018 saw five Drents labs uncovered, which was a record until 2020: with five discovered in the first half of this year alone. In August, too, a riding school in Nijeveen was raided, and the largest ever Dutch ‘cocaine laundry’ was discovered in a barn.
The figures from the police also show that since 2016, waste from drug labs has been dumped in eight places in Drenthe. This happened once in 2017, four times in 2018, once in 2019 and twice in the first half of 2020. Those figures will also increase, because barrels of drug waste were also found more recently in Roderesch, Annen and Zuidlaren, over the summer.
Image via Wikimedia user Dickelbers. License here.
